Bureaucracy Versus Leadership
In his seminal work "Leadership", James MacGregor Burns offers a critical analysis of bureaucracy and its complex relationship with leadership. This examination is particularly relevant in today's economic landscape, characterised by oligopolies, monopolies, and emerging plutotechnocracies.
The Nature of Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy Versus Leadership
In his seminal work "Leadership", James MacGregor Burns offers a critical analysis of bureaucracy and its complex relationship with leadership. This examination is particularly relevant in today's economic landscape, characterised by oligopolies, monopolies, and emerging plutotechnocracies.
Bureaucracy vs. Leadership
Burns contrasts bureaucratic structures with effective leadership:
• Bureaucracy eliminates personalised relationships and non-rational considerations, reducing the potential for transactional leadership.
• It assumes consensus and discredits conflict, viewing it as a threat to stability rather than a source of innovation.
• The bureaucratic model substitutes authority for power, focusing on formal positions rather than personal characteristics or the merit of decisions.
Bureaucracy is characterised by explicitly formulated goals, rules, and procedures that define and regulate members' roles. It emphasises specialisation, expertise, and minutely specified roles, prioritising consistency, predictability, and efficiency over creativity and principle.
Impact on Innovation and Power
The text highlights how bureaucratic structures can hinder innovation and alter power dynamics:
• Bureaucracy discourages the tapping of motivational bases among employees and the marshalling of personal resources.
• It assumes consensus and discredits clash and controversy, potentially stifling creativity and progress.
• Authority is substituted for power, with formal positions taking precedence over personal characteristics or decision merit.
Current Economic Challenges
The bureaucratic model described by Burns aligns with several issues in today's economy:
• Zombie Companies: These inefficient firms, propped up by low interest rates and government support, embody the bureaucratic tendency to prioritise stability over innovation.
• Asymmetric Power: Large corporations and monopolies concentrate power, mirroring the bureaucratic emphasis on formal authority.
• K-Shaped Economies: The widening gap between thriving and struggling sectors reflects the bureaucratic disconnect from diverse human needs and values.
Conflict and Change in Bureaucracies
Despite the stereotype of rigidity, Burns notes that bureaucracies can harbour conflict and potential for change:
• Even disciplined bureaucracies may contain latent and overt conflicts.
• Power struggles can exist among various levels and departments within the organisation.
• The potential for change can arise from internal innovative forces, external pressures, or anticipatory responses to societal shifts.
Leadership Potential in Bureaucracies
Burns suggests that effective bureaucratic leadership is possible when:
• Leaders engage with internal conflicts and remain sensitive to power distribution within the organisation.
• There is recognition of the primary external relationship with those the bureaucracy serves.
• The forces of ossification and innovation are somewhat evenly balanced, creating potential for meaningful change.
**Conclusion**
While bureaucracies often embody characteristics that seem antithetical to dynamic leadership, Burns argues that they can participate in genuine leadership. This requires acknowledging their role as instrumentalities to external ends and maintaining reciprocal relationships with the individuals and groups they serve. The challenge lies in balancing internal organisational needs with the primary external relationships that justify the bureaucracy's existence.
In today's world of oligopolies, monopolies, and plutotechnocracies, the insights provided by Burns remain crucial. They highlight the need for transformational leadership that can navigate the complexities of bureaucratic structures while fostering innovation, addressing asymmetric power dynamics, and bridging the gaps in K-shaped economies. The potential for bureaucratic leadership to drive positive change in society is significant, but it requires a delicate balance between stability and innovation, along with a constant focus on serving the needs of the broader community.
''Bureaucracy Versus Leadership On the face of it, a bureaucratic organization would appear to embody leadership characteristics opposite to those of the small group and transactional leadership. The bureaucratic organization seems to be the product of a conscious decision by leadership to organize human and material resources for a carefully defined goal, while the small group is viewed as the more or less spontaneous, autonomous outgrowth of social conditions. Bureaucratic leadership would appear to have the formal and actual authority to organize and reorganize employees in hierarchical relations for both its continuing and its changing purposes. The small group may follow goals that may be ill-defined, conflicting, and susceptible to group change; its leadership may lack formal legitimacy and perhaps external credibility and be peculiarly vulnerable to the shifting loyalties and purposes of followers. It may be nonhierarchical. However tough and durable a small group may be, according to these perceptions, it draws these qualities from its own resources and not from formal or legal structures or authority. All this contrasts with stereotypes about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the world of explicitly formulated goals, rules, procedures, and givens that define and regulate the place of its “members,” a world of specialization and expertise, with the roles of individuals minutely specified and differentiated. Its employees are organized by purpose, process, clientele, or place. It is a world that prizes consistency, predictability, stability, and efficiency (narrowly defined) more than creativity and principle. Roles and duties are prescribed less by superiors (leaders) than by tradition, formal examinations, and technical qualifications. Careers and job security are protected by tenure, pensions, union rules, professional standards, and appeal procedures. The structure, Robert Merton notes, is one that “approaches the complete elimination of personalized relationships and nonrational considerations (hostility, anxiety, affectual involvements, etc.).” The more these personalized relationships are eliminated, the less potential there is for reciprocity, response to wants, needs, and values—that is, transactional leadership. Bureaucratic behavior as characterized in this archetype is antithetical to leadership as defined in this volume. Through its methodical allotment of tasks, its mediating and harmonizing and “adjustment” procedures, its stress on organizational ethos, goals, and authority, bureaucracy assumes consensus and discounts and discredits clash and controversy, which are seen as threats to organizational stability. Bureaucracy discourages the kind of power that is generated by the tapping of motivational bases among employees and the marshaling of personal—as opposed to organizational—resources. Bureaucracy pursues goals that may as easily become separated from a hierarchy of original purposes and values as from human needs. And bureaucracy, far from directing social change or serving as a factor in historical causation, consciously or not helps buttress the status quo. In this theoretical description of bureaucracy, authority is substituted for power. Bureaucratic authority is formal power that has been vested in persons by virtue of their holding certain positions, that is, vested in the positions themselves; the exercise of power under such authority is recognized both by rulers and decision makers and by those subject to the rules and decisions. The personal characteristics of superior and subordinate and the virtue or good sense of the rules or decisions are held to be irrelevant. Such authority may be used to influence subordinates under a system of rewards and penalties; but authority is typically accepted because the subordinate is motivated to respect its credibility and legitimacy. Formal authority does not acknowledge other motivational bases. Reliability and conformity are the hallmarks of bureaucracy; hence, Merton observes “the fundamental importance of discipline which may be as highly developed in a religious or economic bureaucracy as in the army.” Under this model “the bureaucratization of the world”—whether in democracies, dictatorships, or developing nations—has been so widely noted as to appear to be a universal or at least a dominant phenomenon. Max Weber observed, however, that bureaucratic authority historically was not the rule but the exception. Even in large political systems such as those of the ancient Orient, the Germanic and Mongolian empires of conquest, and many feudal structures of state, he noted, rulers carried out key measures through their inner circles of personal trustees, table companions, and servants of the court. In certain cultures, on the other hand, bureaucracies were the dominant basis of organization—as in Egypt during the new empire; the later Roman principate; the Roman Catholic Church, especially since the thirteenth century; China during most of its recent history; and the modern European state and the large complex capitalistic enterprise. To Weber, development of the money economy was a precondition for the establishment of pure bureaucratic organization. The shifting of the authority to tax and to allocate revenue from lord or satrap to central authority was crucial to the rise of central administration. The purchase of offices, commissions, and sinecures gave way to more impersonal, fixed, and “regular” ways of staffing governments. The most notable sphere of bureaucratization was war. As late as the Thirty Years’ War the soldier still had personal ownership of his weapon, horses, and uniforms, the rank of officer was obtained through purchase of a commission, and the regiment served as an economic and managerial organization operating under the colonel as entrepreneur. War became bureaucratized when it was “nationalized” by the state, much as railways and utilities were later taken over by socialist governments. Bureaucratization of society brought early reactions against its seeming impersonality and rigidity and against a collective arbitrariness that often exceeded the personal capriciousness of the ruler of old. Tocqueville warned of “an immense and tutelary power” that extended its arm over the whole community, covering “the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the more original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.” The fact that this “humanitarian bureaucracy,” as Robert Nisbet called it, was a product of mass democracy and egalitarianism made it seem no less threatening and insidious in the modern world. Whether the reaction against bureaucracy takes the form of grumbling at the endless forms and waiting lines of Soviet officialdom, of complaining about the bottomless “paperwork” of large public and private bureaucracies in the United States, or of protesting the procedures in new nations associated with British and other colonial rule that are often exceeded by new native officials, that reaction is almost as universal as the process of bureaucratization itself. Reasoned repugnance toward bureaucracy is based mainly on two considerations. One is the fear that the individual is swallowed up in the machine, separated from tools, alienated from work, and ultimately, as Thorstein Veblen contended, trained into incapacity: Organization Man and Woman, anti-human, anti-individualistic, anti-their own real nature. The other fear, closely related, is that the original human ends of work or administration come to be submerged in organizational means. Once-rational procedure becomes foolish routine. Paperwork designed to enhance communication now blocks or distorts it. What was a considered hierarchy of ends and means is overturned as instrumental values are substituted for ultimate or terminal values. A change in motives on the part of the bureaucrat goes hand in hand with a displacement of goals, resulting in rigidity and ritualism. These bureaucratic tendencies might seem far removed from the turbulent world of leadership, transformational or transactional, and especially of democratic politics. But one of the most searching dissections of bureaucracy took as its subject the seemingly most dynamic, popular, and goal-minded institution of democracy, the mass political party. Writing of trade unions as well as parties, Robert Michels enunciated a general rule that “the increase in the power of the leaders is directly proportional with the extension of the organization.” Thus the “iron law of oligarchy” inverted the relation of leaders and led. The kind of political party that had been designed to challenge the old aristocratic or autocratic political organizations had itself bureaucratized political organization and stifled political action. Michels’ application of the iron law to political parties, Weber’s thesis that the demos never “governs” larger associations but rather that the mass of people are governed by executives and administrators, the contention of a multitude of analysts that bureaucracy subordinates employees to rigid authority—such concepts pose a paradox for the study of leadership and bureaucracy. On the one hand, bureaucracy would seem to be, as we have noted, the very distillation of leadership, since administrative means are carefully organized to carry out explicit ends; if some of the directives may appear to be outmoded or anachronistic, leadership has the authority to change them. On the other hand, the classic stereotype of bureaucracy—rigidity, oligarchy, deference, impersonality, specialization, lack of reciprocal relationship of wants, needs, motives, and values between leaders and followers—would seem to represent the negation of leadership. To the extent that bureaucracy is in practice the simple application of authority from the top down, it is not leadership. To the extent that it exemplifies conflict, power, values, and change in accordance with leader-follower needs, it embodies leadership. Even the outwardly most disciplined and unified bureaucracy may harbor latent and overt conflict. Analysis of an industrial organization will typically identify not only employer-employee tension but power struggles among top managers, between line and staff personnel, and among members with different professional affiliations or kinds of expertness, and other tensions that shade into the personal and the idiosyncratic. The most disciplined army is full of grumbling, jockeying, intramural competition, and criticism. Conflict is often sharper in public bureaucracies because of their legal obligations to respond to clientele groups which in turn exert pressures on them (e.g., taxpayer groups and contractors in relation to defense departments). Conflict between individual need systems and environmental demands, Warren Bennis postulates, occurs in all segments of organization; the degree of conflict “depends primarily on the level of aspiration of the individual as determined by his reference groups and personality factors, and of need satisfaction rather than the environmental conditions.” Conflict may vary with the location of positions: Robert L. Kahn noted that positions deep in an organizational structure were relatively conflict-free, while positions located near the “skin or boundary” of the organization were likely to be conflict-ridden. Conflict within public bureaucracies is also affected by the political culture and climate—the extent, for example, to which the free play and combat of interests are stifled, permitted, or encouraged in the outside world. The question is not the existence of conflict within public bureaucracies but its character, intensity, and the manner in which it is expressed, channeled, or camouflaged. At the root of bureaucratic conflict lies some kind of struggle for power and prestige. This struggle pervades the bureaucracy because it engages persons who tap one another’s motivational and need bases and who have various power resources (withdrawal of services, denial of esteem to others, widening the area of conflict by such devices as giving “confidential” stories to the press, appeals up the line to superiors or unions or professional associations) that they can employ or mobilize in this process. This is the “real” authority that lies behind the “legitimate” authority of executives and foremen. The authorities are supposed to have a monopoly of sanctions and hence of formal power in bureaucracies, but since sanctions are as variegated as the human wants and needs that activate them, sanctions may be widely distributed throughout the bureaucracy. While the actual extent of the distribution will vary broadly from organization to organization depending on a host of internal and external factors, the analysis of power in bureaucracy cannot be confined within the boundaries of formal authority. In bureaucracy, as in other social entities, power is arbitrary and feckless unless guided by purpose. What objectives, intentions, or goals, measured by what values, inform the uses of institutional power? The answers, again, are as varied as the motives of administrative leaders and followers. If bureaucracies were rationally organized and led, administrators would act according to a hierarchy of ends and means, a comprehensive and integrated scale of values. In actual behavior, Herbert A. Simon writes, “a high degree of conscious integration is seldom attained. Instead of a single branching hierarchy, the structure of conscious motives is usually a tangled web or, more precisely, a disconnected collection of elements only weakly and incompletely tied together, and the integration of these elements becomes progressively weaker as the higher levels of the hierarchy—the more final ends—are reached.” This does not mean that bureaucrats are utterly lost in a maze of immediate motives and ultimate values. Particularly in public bureaucracies, where the agency is committed by statute to certain objectives, officials may make more than a token effort to realize those objectives. Often we find in even sharper form the ambivalence noted between the pursuit of personal ends such as income and job security and the pursuit of broader, more collective ends such as the established goals of the agency. While every organization embraces both sets of values, usually in the same person, the allegiance to more general ends is typically greater in a public than in a private bureaucracy (such as a business enterprise) because in the latter the institutional ethic and the commercial subculture around it support an unembarrassed pursuit of higher profits, more pay, and better working conditions. To be sure, in public bureaucracies perhaps more than in private, rules originally conceived as means to ends become transformed into ends-in-themselves as Merton has pointed out, and instrumental values become terminal values, but at least the broader purposes and values remain there to be invoked by political authority and leadership. Ultimately, as both Weber and Parsons have insisted, organizations must be tested and defined by purpose. And change? The stereotyped view of bureaucracy is one of an institution braced against change. As a Harvard professor during the 1960s, Henry Kissinger wrote an article that lamented the stifling influence of the foreign policy bureaucracy on creative diplomacy. “Attention tends to be diverted from the act of choice—which is the ultimate test of statesmanship—to the accumulation of facts. Decisions can be avoided until a crisis brooks no further delay, until the events themselves have removed the element of ambiguity. But at that point the scope for constructive action is at a minimum. Certainty is purchased at the cost of creativity.” Not surprisingly, when Kissinger became White House foreign policy adviser and then secretary of state, he circumvented the structure of department bureaucracy and process in a way some would castigate as “Lone Ranger diplomacy.” Certainly the great administrative agencies in virtually all societies encompass powerful forces that guard the ramparts against threats to the status quo. But this protective and rigidifying tendency is not universal and inevitable. If potential or actual conflict exists in the bureaucracy, if bureaucrats respond to wider sets of values than the narrow organization norms, if these dynamic forces engage persons’ needs and motives and hence manifest themselves in new power patterns and alignments, then the bureaucracy may become more a seedbed for change than an arena for stasis. This process will vary with the type of change. At the least the bureaucracy may respond to internal innovative forces, in the case of the coming to power of a new executive leader who can mobilize support within the bureaucracy on the basis of legitimacy as the new leader, the appeal of the program to some bureaucratic elements, and the power to reward friends and penalize foes in the agency. This was the case when Kissinger took the helm of the State Department in 1973. Yet as Kissinger and countless others have discovered, the administrator may find these powers inadequate in dealing with encrusted routines and widespread resistance and hence may have to find other ways of mobilizing administrative resources. More typically, even hostile bureaucrats change to at least some degree in response to external pressure because of the need to survive and the civil service ethic of neutrality. Radicals and revolutionaries may feel the need to transform the structure of the entire bureaucracy or to abolish it to fulfill their goals. Successful revolutionaries usually replace the old with a new form of bureaucracy. Another type of change is generated internally. Certain bureaucratic elements, reflecting both their developing needs and external societal influences, serve as forces of change within some administrative enclaves, and the spirit of change may be contagious. Still another type of change is anticipatory; as Louis Gawthrop says, the force of change may be anticipated by the organization, which is then in a position to “respond” to the change even before an external or internal group makes the specific demand for the change. The test of change is not passive adaptation but policy and organizational innovation and creativity, and these depend, as Victor Thompson and others have contended, on the maintenance within bureaucracies of legitimized conflict and a “pluralized babble.” “Not I, but ten thousand clerks, rule Russia,” sighed an eighteenth-century czar. In bureaucracy Weber saw the possibility for both freedom and despotism—for the liberation of humankind through collective reason, and for the dehumanization of people through the conversion of bureaucratic means into ends. Less grandiosely, we can see potentials for both ossification and innovation in most public bureaucracies. The potential for bureaucratic leadership is at its fullest when these forces are somewhat evenly balanced in conflict. By responding to this conflict, by engaging the forces that play on and in the organization, by remaining sensitive to the distribution of power within the agency, bureaucratic leadership can be an important part of the broader forces of party, legislative, and executive leadership that bring change to the entire society. Public bureaucracies participate in genuine leadership if, recognizing that they themselves are instrumentalities to external ends, they respond to reciprocal relationships with the individuals and groups they exist to serve. Bureaucracy has had a bad name because the reciprocal relationship is often forgotten or distorted—bureaucracies may lead, but they are also followers, “servants of the people.” Too often bureaucracies acknowledge only their internal reciprocity and the transactional relationship between managers and employees and in consequence respond to their own mutual wants, needs, motives, and values without acknowledging the primary relationship, which is external. Thus bureaucracies may make their own survival the terminal value rather than an instrumental one. Welfare recipients or “clients,” students, patients, constituents of private and religious organizations, customers, often find themselves regarded as irrelevant nuisances by those hired to serve them. Public bureaucracies may be more vulnerable to this distortion than private retail business because they often lack competition, demand for accountability of performance, and dependency on the client for job security and advancement. Private business may also be vulnerable the further it gets from its customers and the more monopolistic it becomes. ''
Burns, James MacGregor. Leadership (Harper Perennial Political Classics) (pp. 295-302). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
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